Crowded World
by kerlin
Summary: [JuliaSimon, JuliaVaughn] Of all the skeazy clubs in all the glitzy French cities...(Lost Years)


**rating:** R

**pairing:** Julia/Simon, Julia/Vaughn

**summary:** Of all the skeazy clubs in all the glitzy French cities...(Lost Years)

**disclaimer:** So not mine.

* * *

And after all, it wasn't like she should have been surprised. 

Mission well-completed, and adrenaline jitters to work off somewhere that wasn't horizontal: they both had flights leaving in a few hours and no time to check into a hotel room, not that Simon hadn't suggested it. Had nearly driven her to it, despite her own better judgment, with his clever hands in the backseat of the taxi they shared. When Julia pulled the trigger and her target's right temple exploded into gray matter, there was a twitchy moment when she wanted nothing more than to confront Simon down in the dingy basement room where he was running op tech. She thought about it while she slid the gun back into her purse and bluffed her way out of the secure back area with a story well-punctuated by drunken hiccups. His voice over the comm, the sly insinuations he put into even the most mundane phrases, so she half-wondered if he didn't have his fly down and was finishing the job she'd started earlier.

She met him halfway across the city, and the concrete was rough and cold against her back as he pressed her up against it, mouth seeking hers, fingers diving under the short skirt she'd changed into in the bathroom of a McDonald's (only place on the way with a public bathroom, and now the only place in the city with a $300 cocktail dress stuffed in its trash can, though with Paris you never knew). Julia told herself when he shoved his hands away that she wasn't just being coy, but practical. She had an early-morning flight back to Rome and a dead-drop for Kendall to complete before then.

Remembering Kendall meant remembering other times her body had hummed in response to a voice over the comms, and it was in response to _that_ unwelcome awareness that Julia decided to exorcise her demons and drag Simon to this club.

So here they were, on a dance floor where it couldn't truly be said that any two people were dancing so much as bodies were packed so close. The press ensured constant movement and friction: against your partner's skin, against a stranger's skin.

Even with that, she and Simon were close, bodies pressed in together, his hand kneading the back of her thigh, hers pressed flat against his shoulder blade as they ground together. She knew by the grimace on his face that their movement was a poor substitute, and as she threw her head back he communicated his displeasure by bending his head down and nipping, hard, on her collarbone. It was unexpected, and her hitch of movement in response drove her even further into contact with him, bringing her directly into line with a hardness that told her just how frustrated Simon was with her decision. By way of apology, she tucked her head in and sucked hard on his earlobe, following it with a nip of her own that she could feel reverberate down his entire body.

The rest of their bodies were in constant movement: legs twining and untwining, shoulders shifting to the music, the sweet friction produced by the simple fact of being in a mass of moving people. The music was loud enough that the very air in her lungs pounded with it, vibrating up her chest and through her throat.

Soon enough, all the actual heat bled out of their posturing and left them with what they always were when not interacting sexually: a power play. He tugged on her hair to pull her lips back from his neck and kiss her; she responded by using her teeth on his bottom lip. His legs trapped hers, she escaped; she wove her fingers through his hair, he twisted her arm out and trapped it at her side with his own.

By mutual accord, they maneuvered themselves off the dance floor and tapped shots together in silent self-congratulations for a flawless assassination. There was now one less K-Directorate agent left to double-cross the Covenant. Not that there wasn't an endless supply, but Julia supposed that's what kept her in designer clothes and penthouses.

Simon leaned in close and shouted something in her ear about having seen a former associate at the other end of the dance floor. She pouted to just the right increment so that they would both recognize it as fake, and trailed a finger down the skin left bare by the open buttons of his shirt. Hooking her fist in the fabric, she pulled him in for one last, branding kiss.

He left her to make his way across the room, and when Julia turned back to the bar, she saw Michael Vaughn sitting there, watching her.

The true impact of a sonic boom is in how it seems to suck all the sound out of the world for the split-second before it explodes across the consciousness, and that was what Julia Thorne felt when her two worlds collided in such a clichéd and spectacular fashion.

He didn't look like the lover she had left that spring night, or the grieving survivor at her funeral, or even the cautiously happy man on his date with the unknown blonde woman. He looked less, and more: all his excess flesh, what little there had been of it, was pared down and honed. There was nothing in the way he looked at her and held his whiskey but cold calculation, and yet at the same time he seemed coiled and poised, filled with a dark energy that she had never seen in him before.

Vaughn's eyes were the only indication that anything was out of the ordinary, and there was a freefalling moment when she thought she might lose everything, faced with the mix of hope, grief, and cynicism that he was evaluating her with.

Sydney Bristow would have run to her lover, would have comforted him and convinced him to come away with her, would have naively thought that there was any way this could end well.

Julia Thorne hitched a hip up on a bar stool, revealing two more inches of bare leg, and smiled seductively at him. "See something you like?" she shouted, grateful for the volume of the music - if she'd had to deal in subtleties tonight, they would both be dead in the time it took for Simon to look back across the room at her face.

For a moment, his face flickered - and then the mask came back into place. "I might," he replied.

She silently thanked every deity she no longer believed in for all the alcohol he had obviously already consumed, and for the cynicism that was preventing him from believing the impossible truth. It was only her heart that would break tonight.

Letting fingers trail along the bar as she walked, Julia left her empty shot glass behind and tucked her body into the space left by his sprawled legs, body to body, and oh, he smelled exactly the same -

But the sneer twisting his lips was equal parts mistrust and distaste, and she used that to ground herself in reality so that when she put her lips next to his ear, memories of his scent were far-off and futile. "I could try and convince you," she murmured as softly as she was able, with the music still pounding in her chest, keeping an offbeat rhythm to her heart.

His hand on her shoulder jerked her back so that she was facing him again, and slowly, Vaughn unwrapped his fingers from the now-empty glass of whiskey. He gripped her other shoulder tightly, almost painfully. For one, two, three seconds he looked at her, a faint edge of desperation in his searching eyes, and she could see the steps of the decision. He hadn't changed so much that she couldn't read him: first came his awareness of the alcohol in his bloodstream, then her altered appearance with no sign of a wig, and finally the moment when he threw caution to the wind.

Vaughn leaned in and kissed her.

Julia fought the urge to flail, to reach for him and soften the kiss and match it to any of a hundred memories - the wreckage of SD-6, her kitchen, the hockey rink - but even though Vaughn nearly broke her in a way the Covenant never had, she kept a fingertip hold on the world around her and pushed aggressively against him. Heat seeped into her body through his thin black t-shirt and her red lace top, and she was grateful for that at least, would keep it with her through a long winter in Rome.

She pulled back with a carefully constructed smirk, and, catching his hand, led him to the dance floor.

He had new calluses - gun calluses, patterns across his palm and finger that bespoke of long hours at the shooting range or its real-life equivalent - and she found that both arousing and sorrowing until he crossed over behind her and, releasing her hand, pulled her hips back against him.

Her groan was inaudible in the pounding noise, but he must have felt the vibration against his chest, because he began to grind, slow and slightly out of rhythm with the music and in a fashion designed to drive rational thought from her mind. Soon, the only awareness Julia had was of touch: the dull thud of sound in her chest, the heat from his body, the delicious pressure against her ass, and his fingers digging into her hips.

She reached up and back with her arms, and hooked them behind his neck, twining her fingers together and teasing the fine hairs of his nape with her fingertips even as she used her cupped hands to put leverage on the top of his spine and bring him closer. Vaughn released his grip on her hips, and she found herself missing the sudden pressure, pushing backward of her own accord. They moved, twisting into each other slowly, and then faster, gradually coming into time with the music.

Vaughn's hands didn't leave her for long, and she barely had time to miss them before he covered her hands with his and trailed his fingertips, feather-light, down her arms, the path a premeditated contrast to the force of his hips thrusting against hers. She arched against his splayed fingers when he moved them slowly, so slowly, down the sides of her breasts. With her reaction, he abandoned the pretense of gentleness and pushed his flat hands hard down her chest, against her stomach, to her hips again, down to her thighs where his fingers curled in ever so slightly.

His touch left her gasping in its wake, and she arched again against his hands on her thighs, her mind scattered into pieces and she wasn't pretending any longer - Julia and Sydney were both lost and all she could do was tighten her fingers against the back of his neck to show him what he was doing to her.

Vaughn dipped his head down to touch his lips, then his tongue, to the skin between her neck and shoulder, sheened over with sweat, and Julia dropped her head back onto her arm to give him better access to her throat - which he promptly took advantage of.

It was as he began to slide fingers under the hem of her skirt that she realized how very quickly this was getting out of control. It had, in fact, been a mistake from the very beginning, indulging in the fantasy that the past eight months hadn't happened and they were just Sydney and Vaughn again, instead of Julia and this strange new Vaughn, cold and hard and about two minutes away from finger-fucking a woman who looked like his dead girlfriend in the middle of the dance floor.

So she began to disengage. A quick twist of her hips jostled his hands from her thighs, and broke the contact between their bodies - only by a fraction of an inch, but it was enough to let some of the relatively cooler air of the club in, and shock Julia the rest of the way to sense.

But Vaughn was a trained spy, and the sudden disengage would have been too abrupt, would have raised suspicion. So she spun around him, twisting her arms so that they were face-to-face, and there she made her second (third? fourth? she'd lost count) mistake of the night. Her senses were still hyper-tuned to his touch, and as he rested his palms on her hips, something like recognition came across his face.

Every instinct in her was screaming to go, go, go, but they could have been standing in her living room again, ready to drive to work, or out to dinner - anywhere but where they were, and she stood up on her toes and kissed him.

When he'd kissed her, earlier, she had deliberately altered the quality of the kiss to forestall similarities; now, she invited them. She plied his lips gently with her own in a manner almost laughably chaste compared to the way they had just been acting a few seconds earlier. He stayed still for a moment, surprised, and then he reacted hungrily, bringing his hands up to frame her face and it was SD-6, it was her kitchen, it was the hockey rink -

And then she pulled back and nearly shook with the effort to hold back tears and work up a smirk to leave him with. She wasn't entirely successful, she could tell, because for the first time there was a hint of suspicion, and the gears were turning in his head in a very dangerous way.

Now. She needed to leave now. Over Vaughn's shoulder, she saw Simon clap his friend on the shoulder - God, had it only been a few minutes? - and that provided her the break with the moment she needed to duck out from his hands and disappear into the crowd, making her way to Simon.

He greeted her by hooking his fingers into the waist of her skirt and yanking her toward him for a bruising kiss that she responded to in kind, only allowing herself to wonder briefly whether Vaughn was watching them. "I've changed my mind," she leaned in to yell toward his ear. "We've got time."

His face transformed from mild amusement to wolfish lust in a heartbeat, and he practically dragged her from the club.

Just before leaving, Sydney looked back. Vaughn was gone.

_fin._


End file.
